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RHCP Digital is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published in the United States of America by Dutton Children’s Books 2017

ABOUT THE BOOK

My name is Crow.
When I was a baby, someone tied me into an old boat and pushed me out to sea.

Crow washed up on a tiny, windswept island when she was just a few hours old, with three things: a birthmark in the shape of a feather, a ruby ring, and a sea-soaked letter, of which just a few cryptic words remain.

But it is only when a mysterious fire appears across the water that Crow starts to wonder who she really is, and sets out on an unforgettable treasure hunt – one that will show her what it truly means to be a family.

A NOTE
ABOUT THIS BOOK

Writing is, for me, the finest possible adventure. All I need is a guide and a place to start. The adventure I took in Beyond the Bright Sea began with a young islander named Crow. She simply appeared in my imagination one day, and I spent a few weeks watching her and imagining where she had come from and where she might go next. I knew she would make an incredible guide the minute she introduced me to Osh and their home. And that’s when I began to write. The rest came as it came.

I had a wonderful time creating Crow’s home on a fictional island off Cuttyhunk. It, and the sea itself, made a magical setting and a strong character, too, interacting with Crow and Osh right from the very beginning. I am a sea person, living on Cape Cod, and am in love with the islands off its shores, so I was able to combine things I know very well with other things I learned by reading about island life in the 1920s. The result is a mixture of fact and fiction: a reflection of that place and time, but not an exact replica.

Likewise, Captain Kidd was a real pirate, and there’s evidence that he did bury treasure near the Elizabeths and really did fill Mercy Raymond’s apron with treasure when she helped him resupply his ship off Block Island, though none has ever turned up on Penikese (as far as I know).

But all of the other characters in the book—and, especially, the story itself—came completely from my imagination. Miss Maggie showed up nearly at the beginning, and I was pleased to meet her. The same is true of Mouse. I love them both very much. And they fit quite naturally into my blend of real and imagined life on Cuttyhunk.

I’ve been to some of the other Elizabeths—which also include Nonamesset, Uncatena, Weepecket, Gull, Naushon, Pasque, and Nashawena—so I know them firsthand, but I did a lot of research to learn what they were like nearly a century ago.

Some believe that Shakespeare wrote The Tempest after reading the journals of Bartholomew Gosnold, who first visited the Elizabeths in 1602, and that the island in the play is actually based on Cuttyhunk, not Bermuda or Roanoke Island.

Cuttyhunk was, and still is, a wild and isolated place whose shores have many times been littered with the cargo of hundreds of ships wrecked in the Graveyard.

But in the early 1900s, Cuttyhunk was also a summer haven for the wealthy. Famous for its bass fishing, Cuttyhunk attracted businessmen who used carrier pigeons to communicate with their city offices. Whoever caught the biggest striped bass each year was called the “High Hook.” Most fished from bass stands on the Cuttyhunk rocks, but the best fishing by boat was around Sow and Pigs Reef, better known simply as the Pigs, named because people thought the rocks looked like a mother pig with her babies. The area is no playground, though. The strong winds, rocks, currents, surf, and fog make it the site of hundreds of shipwrecks, which is why it is known as the Graveyard.

But there is no place in the Elizabeths as serious as the island of Penikese. Learning about that place and its people broke my heart and made me ache for Crow as she struggled, through a confusion of fear and hope, to find her roots.

Like the other islands, the Penikese in this book is a mixture of fact and fiction. At various times in its history, the island was a school of natural history and a turkey farm, among other things, before it became a colony to isolate smallpox patients and then to quarantine people with Hansen’s disease, then known as leprosy. Nearly all “lepers” in the United States came from other parts of the world, including Japan, China, Cape Verde, Tobago, Turkey, Russia, and other countries, but any of them living in Massachusetts in 1905 were sent to live together on Penikese, in isolation, as far as possible from everyone else. They were even confined to “the other side” of the island where their cottages and the hospital—and the cemetery—faced Buzzards Bay to the west. None of them was allowed on the side of the island closest to Cuttyhunk.

The residents of the other Elizabeths were so afraid of the Penikese patients that nannies would scare naughty children by threatening that the lepers would escape and “come get them” if they didn’t behave. Only one child was ever actually born in the leper colony on Penikese, and he was quickly sent away to the mainland.

Under the care of a very dedicated and kind doctor and his small staff, the patients were able to spend their best days keeping busy with gardening and other simple pleasures, but fourteen of them died and were buried in the island’s small cemetery, leaving behind daffodils and irises that still bloom on “the other side” to this day.

In 1921, after sixteen years of operation, the state closed the colony and transferred its thirteen surviving patients to the federal leprosy hospital in Carville, Louisiana.

A few years after that, the island became a bird “sanctuary,” though the game birds and rabbits raised there were shipped to other areas for hunting.

In 1926, when the state gave up trying to sell the buildings and other materials left when the leper colony closed, they burned and dynamited all that remained.

Between 1945 and 1973, no one lived on Penikese, but people still traveled there to hunt, fish, and camp. Penikese later became the site of a school for “troubled boys,” which closed after thirty-eight years. Today, it is a residential treatment center for young men fighting addiction.

For me, however, Penikese was and always will be where Crow began her life and where so many others ended theirs.

Like the other islands in this book, Penikese was one thing for those who chose to be there, but something very different for those who had no choice.

Writing this book reminded me that happiness is a matter of being where—and who—we want to be.

Osh and Miss Maggie—even Mouse—and especially Crow understand this truth. For them, an island is the best kind of home. Even better because they are together.

For my father, who first took me to sea

The Elizabeth Islands,

off the coast of Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

1925

PROLOGUE

It was Osh who found me and took me in. Who taught me how to put down roots, and thrive on both sun and rain, and understand what it is to bloom.

The island where we found each other was small but strong, anchored by a great pile of black rock that sheltered our cottage—a ramshackle place built from bits of lost ships—nestled on a bed of earth and sea muck, alongside a small garden and the skiff that took us wherever our feet could not.

At low tide, we could cross easily to the next island, Cuttyhunk, through shallows strewn with bootlace weed and minnows.

At high tide, the cottage sat so close to the risen sea that it felt nearly like a boat itself.

For a long time, I was happiest when the water rose and set us apart, on our own, so just the two of us decided everything there was to decide.

And then, one night when I was twelve, I saw a fire burning on Penikese, the island where no one ever went, and I decided on my own that it was time to find out where I’d come from and why I’d been sent away.

On the morning Osh found me, I was just hours old, but he had no calendar and didn’t much care what day it was. So we always marked my birth on whatever midsummer day felt right.

The same was true of my other milestones: moments that had nothing to do with calendars.

Like the day Mouse showed up at our door, whisker thin, and decided the cottage was hers, too. Much as I had.

Or the first time Osh let me take the tiller of our skiff while he sat in the bow and let the sun coddle his face for a while, his back against the mast, the fine spray veiling him in rainbows. Or the ebb tide when a white-sided dolphin stranded on our shore, Osh gone somewhere, and I came back from Cuttyhunk to find her rocking and heaving, her cries babylike and afraid. I used my bare hands to scoop away the wet sand that stuck her fast. And I grabbed her crescent flukes and tugged, inch by inch, until the water lifted her enough so we both slipped back suddenly into the sea.

She looked me in the eye as she passed, as if to memorize what I was at that moment. As if to say that I should remember this, too, no matter what happened later.

Still, I know I’d lived on that tiny island for eight years before I began to be more than just curious about my name. The dream that woke me, wondering anew about my name, was full of stars and whales blowing and the lyrics of the sea. When I opened my eyes, I lay for a minute, watching Osh as he stood at the stove, cooking porridge in a scabby pot.

When Osh stirred the porridge, the spoon made a sound like a boat being dragged across the beach. “I’ve told you,” he said. “You were hoarse with crying when you washed up here. You cawed over and over. So I called you Crow.”

That answer had always been enough before. But it didn’t explain everything. And everything was what I had begun to want.

Osh sometimes spoke in a language I didn’t know, his voice like music, especially when he prayed, but also when he painted his pictures of the islands and the sea. When I first asked Osh about it, he said that it was one of the few things he’d kept from life before the island. Before me.

Even though he did not speak it often, that other tongue flavored his English so he sounded different from everyone else. Miss Maggie called it his accent. But I thought maybe it was everyone else who had an accent.

“No, not English at first,” he said. “But people here speak English. So: Crow.”

I stood and stretched the night out of my bones. My arms, in the thin morning light, looked almost nothing like wings.

But when I stepped onto a stool in front of our mirror—just big enough for a face—I could see the resemblance in the curve of my nose. The birthmark on my cheek that looked like a little feather. My hair, darker than anyone else’s. My dark eyes. My skin, like Osh’s after six months in the sun.

Osh, himself, had three names. Daniel: what Miss Maggie called him. The Painter: what the summer people called him. Osh: what I had called him since the time I could make words out loud.

His real name was complicated. Difficult for a small child to say. “Osh” was all I’d been able to manage. And Osh was what I’d called him ever since.

Osh was again silent for a while. Then he said, “You were brand-new when you arrived here. I don’t know that you ever had a different name.” He scooped some porridge into a bowl. “And if you did, I don’t know how we’ll ever learn what it was.”

When Osh shrugged, the hair that lay on his shoulders rolled up like night waves. “Was. Is. Will be.” He filled a second bowl. “It doesn’t much matter, since you’re here now. And you have a name.”

The sound of the porridge thwupping into the crockery, the tock of the wooden spoon against the edge of the bowl, made me wonder who had named those things. And everything else in the world. Including me.

I could feel my curiosity strengthening, as if it were part of my bones, keeping pace with them as I grew.

But more than that—more than simple curiosity—I had a nagging need to know what I didn’t know.

I wanted to know why there were pearls tucked inside some of the Cuttyhunk oysters but not others. I wanted to know how the moon could drag the ocean in and out from such a distance, when it couldn’t stir the milk in Miss Maggie’s tea. But I needed to know, among other things, why so many of the Cuttyhunk Islanders stayed away from me, as if they were afraid, when I was smaller than any of them.

I wondered whether it had anything to do with where I’d come from, but that didn’t make any sense. What did where have to do with what? Or who?

Osh didn’t. When I asked questions about pearls or tides, he did his best to answer them. But when I looked beyond our life on the islands, he became the moon itself, bent on tugging me back, as if I were made of sea instead of blood.

“I came a long, long way to be here,” he once said when I asked him about his life before the one we shared. “As far as I could get from a place where people—where my own brothers—jumped headlong into such terrible fighting that no one could see a thing through that bedlam. And for what? Over what?” He shook his head. “Over nothing worth the fight. So I refused to be one of them. And here I am. And here I’ll stay.”

While I waited for Osh to bring our porridge to the table, I tried to think of another name that suited me well, but I came up with nothing better than Crow, which I already had.

And it pleased me that I was named for a bird that was smarter than most. Smarter, even, than some people. So different from the gulls and fish hawks that wheeled and dipped over the islands that I felt a certain kinship with the big, black birds that drifted over from the mainland like lost kites, tipping to and fro in the wind before settling noisily in Miss Maggie’s hornbeam tree. They didn’t seem to belong on the islands. And sometimes I felt like I didn’t, either. But we were islanders, nonetheless, no matter what anyone else might think.

Osh called me other animal names from time to time. Cub. Kit. Mule when I was stubborn. Wren when I was good.

Now and then, he called me a mooncusser, too, because I liked to scour the shore at night for whatever the tide had brought in, but I did not lure the ships that wrecked off Cuttyhunk, and I was no thief afraid of being moonlit as I searched for lost treasure. I had never cussed the moon.

But for the most part, we didn’t rely on names. If we were apart, we were far apart, beyond calling. If we were together, we talked the way people talk when there’s no one else. Names didn’t matter much.

OSH HAD BUILT our cottage from whatever he could wrestle off the nearest shipwrecks that were slowly settling into the seabed, breaking up in storms, and otherwise disappearing, bit by bit.

The rest of the house was flotsam that had come to him, floating in on the tide, as I had, sometimes into our own little cove, sometimes on Cuttyhunk, where no one else wanted it.

He’d built the frame from long beams, the roof and walls from decking, the chimney from a vent pipe off a lost steamer, one window from a porthole. Our door was a piece of keel. Our hearth, a hatch lid. Our table a crow’s nest turned upside down.

Osh had salvaged, too, many things that had no purpose but to be dear to us. The finest of these, two figureheads—solemn women with long, flowing hair—stared at us from either side of our fireplace, never blinking. And a pair of sun-white whale ribs arched over our doorway, a tarnished ship’s bell hanging from their pinnacle.

And I’d found my share of baubles while searching the wrack line. Bits of sea glass among the mermaids’ purses and limpet shells. A brass money clip with an elephant pressed into its face, all of it a crusty green. A banjo clock that would never again keep time but had a tiny cupboard where I kept the other trinkets I’d found. Another thing I had in common with crows: our habit of prizing the poorest of riches.

When I asked him what he’d done with the skiff that had brought me ashore, Osh told me he’d busted it up for firewood and burned it to keep me warm that first winter. For a long time, before I knew better, I wondered why that—of all the wood he’d salvaged—had ended up in the fire rather than our home.

With the money he made from lobstering and cutting ice out of Wash Pond and selling his paintings to the summer people, Osh had bought nails, a hammer, and whatever else he lacked. He dug clay from the sound side of Cuttyhunk, sailed it around to our cove, and mixed it with wood ash and salt to make the chinking that sealed the cottage against draft and hard rain. And he did everything else he could to make it strong and snug.

But even as we worked together on this home we’d made, I could not stop thinking about who had made me. Who had looked at me, soft and fresh as a blossom, and decided to give me to the tide. And why.

I carried those questions around with me like a sack that got heavier as the years went by, even though I had become accustomed to the idea of it. Even though I was not unhappy with the life I had.

Osh had told me many times—so often that it had become like a bedtime story—how he’d found me in an old skiff that had beached itself on the wrack line overnight. Had he not found me when he had, the incoming tide would have taken me back out again, to somewhere else. But he had wanted fish for his breakfast and had gone out to cast for a striper or two.

The skiff was barely seaworthy, but it had survived the trip to the island, even through the wild currents that wrecked much bigger boats.

What Osh expected to see when he came up to the little skiff I don’t know, but it could not have been a new baby, lashed to the bench with strips of dirty linen, inches above the water that had seeped into the hull.

Osh told me how I stopped cawing and lay silent as a mouse when a hawk-shadow comes—I blinking up at him and he down at me—that morning when we first met.

He lived alone in a place that was difficult even for a grown man, but he took me in first before deciding what else to do with me. And I stayed.

He often told me how hard it was in those first days after I arrived. How he had traded lobsters for milk at the Cuttyhunk grocery, poured it in a little flask, and fashioned a nipple from a clam neck made to squirt seawater. I sucked salty milk from it, as if from the sea itself. He swaddled me in wind-softened sailcloth, washed me in a smooth sink in the rocks where rainwater collected. Tucked me up alongside him at night so we slept as one.

By the time Miss Maggie and the others found out about me, Osh had decided that I was his until someone else could prove otherwise.

Miss Maggie had tried for a while. Not, she said, to take me away. Only, she said, to make sure no one was searching for me. Perhaps, she said, my mother hadn’t been the one to send me to sea. Perhaps, she said, my mother was pacing the shores across Buzzards Bay, her breasts swollen with milk.

So Miss Maggie bullied the postmaster until he sent word on his telegraph machine to ports from Narragansett to Chilmark, asking if anyone was looking for a newborn like me.

And she wrote letters, too, and sent them to places too small for a telegraph machine.

From some, she got no answer: Onset; Mattapoisett; even Penikese, though it was the closest.

By the time the replies made their way into Miss Maggie’s hands, I’d already become Osh’s. And he had become mine.

It was a mystery why the skiff had washed up on our little island and not on Cuttyhunk where most treasure and flotsam came to rest. But I was glad that it had.

I couldn’t imagine that any of the other islanders would have fostered me had I drifted up on their piece of land. I thought it far more likely that they would have sent me off to the mainland, to some place without so much sea and sky. And that would have been a shame. Osh and I were surrounded by a wild world. And I preferred it that way.

Still, there were a few people on Cuttyhunk I liked well enough. And they seemed to like me in their odd way. But they never touched me. Never came close. Seemed content to know me from a distance. Which had been true from the very start—all I’d ever known from them—so I didn’t question it much until I was older and began to pull on the loose threads in my life.

When I did that and everything began to unravel, a seam opened up and let in some light, which helped me see my life more clearly, but it also made me want to close my eyes, sometimes, instead.

I was often sick as a baby and still too often sick as a child, and Miss Maggie was the only one to cross to our island with bread and soup and one of the potions she brewed from rose hips and nettle leaf. Hers was the only hand that had ever touched me, if I didn’t count Osh or those who came before him, though I always did.

Despite all her hard work, her hands were as smooth as the inside of an oyster shell. When I asked her why, she frowned and told me that they were soft from the lanolin in the sheep’s wool she sheared from her flock—or picked from the sheep that died in the rough—and spun into yarn. “But that doesn’t mean they aren’t strong,” she said, as if I had doubted it.

When she put those hands on my hot forehead, I thought of sea lavender and April. But she hardly ever smiled, and when she talked everything came out with a hint of thunder in it. A little scolding, no matter what I’d done or hadn’t done.

“You’ll eat this soup and every spoonful,” she’d growl. “You hear me?”

And I did eat every spoonful: No one else on Cuttyhunk made better soup than Miss Maggie did, with vegetables that came from the finest garden on the islands. She started her seedlings in hotbeds as soon as the sun was stronger than the snow and planted them out after the last thaw in a vast garden, rich with manure and sea muck: potatoes, celery, beans, cabbage, horseradish, snap peas, barley, melons, onions, cucumbers, tomatoes, and turnips.

If she spoke rough to me, she said softer things to her cows. And although they ate the same oats as all the other Cuttyhunk cows, hers gave the best milk on the island, so her butter was the best, too. And she made her hens so happy with marigolds and barley that they laid like troupers and hatched out more chicks than any on the Elizabeth Islands. With the flour and oil she got from trading eggs, Miss Maggie baked bread that made me happier than if I’d had cake, which I tasted only once in a blue moon. I was almost glad to be sick if it meant her bread and soup.

“She does make good soup,” Osh always said before she arrived and after she left. “But soup is just one thing.”

“Don’t you worry that you’ll get sick, too?” I’d ask her as I lay in bed, my head aching.

“I’ve been sick before,” she’d say. “And I’ll be sick again, with or without your help.”

MISS MAGGIE LIVED in a smart little house apart from most of the other year-rounders, though with all her animals she was not completely alone. One bad winter (though I don’t know that there was ever a good one), she brought the smallest pig into the house with her and, when spring came, had to drag him back to his pen. When a half dozen wild turkeys froze in the sassafras trees alongside her barn, she carried them inside, one by one, like big, ugly babies, wrapped them in flannel, stood them by the fire, and fed them hot whiskey and milk. Every last one survived, and they neither pecked nor harried her when the thaw was complete, but simply walked out her front door into the sunshine the next day.

Four of her rabbits did not fare so well. Though she rescued their frozen bodies from the hutch and fed them the same strong drink, they revived for just a while before dying once and for all, so she skinned them and made them into a mighty stew with carrots from her root cellar and bacon from her smokehouse.

“It was the best stew I ever made,” she said, “and I ate up every bit of it, but I was sorry for the way those poor rabbits died.”

Mouse had a fur coat, too, and I loved to bury my face in it. To listen to the rumble in her chest.

We called her Mouse because that’s what she said over and over again when she was hungry.

She settled for scraps of fish and a little of the jerky that Osh made from beef and blueberries. Or the fish heads that the Cuttyhunk men tossed back into the sea after cleaning their catch.

Sometimes she brought us a gift—once it was an eel that wriggled and rolled when she dropped it at my feet and that we all three ate in a stew—but usually she was too hungry to be proud of herself. All three of us were skinny. All three of us ate what we had, and we didn’t think about what we didn’t have.

Mouse was an obliging cat most of the time, but when Osh pinned her between his knees and trimmed her longest fur for his paintbrushes, she squirmed and yowled so pathetically that I mashed my hands over my ears and looked away.

“I’m not hurting her,” Osh said as he carefully cut what he needed. “It’ll grow back.”

After he had harvested the bits that were longest—and farthest away from her claws—Osh spent a moment plowing through her remaining fur, yanking ticks as he found them. Some were as big as peas.

The first time I ever did that, small starbursts of Mouse’s blood remained, so from then on I set them adrift on the current instead.

Miss Maggie could order almost anything from the mainland, and she sometimes sent for things Osh couldn’t buy from the Cuttyhunk market.

“This is free,” he said, binding the fur to the tip of a brush handle. When he sculpted it to a point, such a brush would let him paint the pinfeathers of a young meadowlark or the petals of a wood lily.

I confess that I myself was often cold during those long winters on the island with Osh. Of course I wished for fresh apples and strawberries when the entire world was white and gray and the ground was iron hard, but mostly I wished for shipwreck wood that would mean warm hands and feet in January.

I never asked for the wrecks that granted those wishes, though. And since there was nothing I had done to cause such things and nothing I could do to stop them, I didn’t feel bad about salvaging what we could when ships came to grief in the waters off Cuttyhunk, so turbulent that they were known as the Graveyard.

You might think that we wished most fervently for gold or silver—and I have to admit that when I finally found some treasure of that sort I was glad, for many reasons—but we never found any cargo more precious than the blacksmith coal that we harvested from a ship after it foundered in an August storm. Every single one of the crew survived, which was cause enough for celebration, but we were happy, too, that the ship had wrecked in the shallows so that at low tide we islanders could walk out in our tall boots, pulling dinghies along behind, to load up as much coal as we could and ferry it back to shore. The tide brought more to us, littering the wrack line with chunks of it that we gathered like shell seekers who knew too much about frostbite.

We treasured that coal and used it sparingly so it would stretch into a second winter. Even in June, when the cold weather was a world away, I could sweeten any bad day by remembering that one amazing thing: Come winter, we would be warm.

No one who’s ever been as cold as a New England islander in February would care more about gold than coal.

But when I learned from Miss Maggie that coal squeezed by the weight of the world turned to diamonds, I looked at it differently and wondered what other rough and simple stuff held the promise of something rare.

The ships that had wrecked in the Graveyard took plenty of cargo down with them, and not all of it was lumber or cotton or rum.

A few of the islanders had found real riches from time to time. A diamond necklace caught in a lobster trap. A gold ingot in the tines of a scallop rake. One man, pulling an anchor off Naushon, hooked an old crown that had been buried in the muck for a century. Another, clamming off Nashawena, found a huge silver belt buckle that he cleaned up and wore as proudly as the buccaneers who had once sailed these waters, some of them true pirates, though only one of them—Captain Kidd—had been known to hide loot or give it away instead of spending it.

He gifted a fortune to Mercy Raymond, on Block Island, just down the seaboard from us, filling her apron with gold and jewels simply because she’d been kind. And he buried more on Cherry Tree Field on Gardiners Island, not so far from Cuttyhunk, before Governor Bellomont sent it to England, proof that the captain was a thief, and not just of gold or silver.

Miss Maggie was happy with plain and simple, but she sometimes spiced my geography lessons with talk of gemstones caught and kept—and sometimes buried—by pirates like the wily William Kidd: African diamonds, Burmese rubies, Brazilian emeralds, all of them forged by the alchemy of the earth’s hot spots. So hard and resilient that they could last for centuries in the cold salt and sand of islands like ours.

Lots of people thought Captain Kidd might have buried loot on the Elizabeths, well within his stomping grounds, but no one who had gone digging for treasure out here had ever found any.

That did nothing to deter the mainlanders who came out by ferry in the warm weather to muck about on the shores of Cuttyhunk, hoping to find what Captain Kidd might have buried or what the currents had stripped from the shipwrecks slowly surrendering to rot in the Graveyard.

We liked to watch those mainlanders follow the receding tide out as far as it went, plunging long rods into the sand, hoping for the clunk of metal, sometimes digging up an old lantern or a rusty chain before being chased ashore by the incoming tide.

It never occurred to me, as I watched them search, that I would be the one to find the treasure they sought. Or that I would find it in a place where none of them would ever have dared to look.

BEFORE MISS MAGGIE explained why the other islanders were afraid of me, I’d sometimes wondered why people would shake her by the hand but wave at me, instead.

I’d always figured it was because I was little. With a name like Crow. And so different from them, besides, like the calico lobsters that turned up in traps very rarely and always with great to-do.

When I asked Osh about it, he shrugged and talked in circles, as if I’d asked why women don’t have beards.

Contents

ABOUT THE BOOK

A NOTEABOUT THIS BOOK

PROLOGUE

A NOTE
ABOUT THIS BOOK